Review: Working with My Heroes

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Cover image of "Working with My Heroes" by John DeMain and Greg Hettmansberger

Working with My Heroes

Working with My Heroes, John Demain and Greg Hettmansberger. University of Wisconsin Press (ISBN: 9780299352202) 2026.

Summary: A memoir by Madison Symphony Orchestra’s director, tracing his mentors from Youngstown to the greats of American music.

His parents recognized his musical gifts at age three when he would join the women’s choir at Mt. Carmel Italian Church to sing the benediction hymns. Now in his eighties, John DeMain, music director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra for 32 years, has had an incredible life in music, which he recounts in this memoir, co-authored with the late Greg Hettmansberger, who died in a tragic auto accident in 2020. DeMain narrates his life while Hettmansberger provides researched background material. The demarcate their respective contributions in different typefaces.

Together, they trace his life from his childhood in Youngstown, Ohio, his training at Juilliard, his decision to conduct and early experiences, culminating with work with the Houston Grand Opera (HGO). In 1996, they staged the first production of George Gershwin’s complete score of Porgy and Bess, winning a Grammy Award for the recording. Leonard Bernstein told DeMain that this was the Porgy and Bess production that he had waited forty years to hear. It led to work with Bernstein, premiering A Quiet Place and with John Adams, premiering Nixon in China, in 1987. In 1994, when the HGO fell into financial troubles, DeMain realized a longing for symphonic conducting and pursued a position with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, believing Madison a good place for he and his wife Barbara to raise their young daughter.

DeMain has led the Madison Symphony Orchestra since then, recently stepping down as music director. He continues to direct the Madison Opera. During that time, he has led the Orchestra to take huge leaps in professionalism, enjoyed broad community support and engagement with the community, and opened a new performing arts center. All this and more is detailed in an informative and highly entertaining narrative. He includes stories of playing piano at a mob wedding and personal insights into many of the luminaries with whom he worked.

As a fellow Youngstown native, I enjoyed learning of the role Youngstown played in his development. He had gifted piano teachers, Hermann and Blanche Gruss. His first mentor was the founding conductor of the Youngstown Symphony, Michael Ficocelli. As his fourth grade music teacher, he taught him conducting and he filled in when Ficocelli couldn’t be there. At age nine, he soloed in Amahl and the Night Visitors with the Youngstown Playhouse. Eventually, he became dance rehearsal accompanist for a Playhouse production of Paint Your Wagon, mentored by music director Lillian Butcher Stambaugh. Then, he served as musical director of Brigadoon for the Playhouse as a high school freshman. A benefactor, Lawrence Lawler, recognizing his gifts, took him to see a touring company of the Metropolitan Opera in Cleveland.

All this culminated in entering the Youngstown Symphony’s concerto competition in 1961. Going up against more highly trained competition, including a Juilliard student, he won, opening the door for him to study at Julliard. During and after his time at Juilliard, He worked with John Kenley’s summer stock productions. Through Kenley, he learned to care for touring stars, culminating with opera great Giorgio Tozzi in Man of La Mancha. [I saw that production on a date in high school!]

DeMain not only chronicles his work with heroes like Jorge Mester at Juilliard, Julius Rudel at the New York City Opera, and Bernstein. He also takes us behind the scenes of various productions, both the technical and personal challenges. He describes his working relationship with various soloists and his flexibility in working with singers. For Porgy, he became a learner, learning from Black performers the southern religious culture behind the spirituals in the full version. Implicit in his account of the Madison years, I sense the community itself has been one of his heroes.

Don’t skip DeMain’s Afterword, “Some Notes for Conductors and Thoughts on the Future.” This is a concise but illuminating distillation of his philosophy of conducting. He also offers his own, mostly optimistic, reflections on the future of classical music.

DeMain and Hettmansberger collaborated seamlessly. Hettmansberger’s background material flows into DeMain’s storytelling without being disjointed. Thus, the book combines scholarly biography with engaging memoir.

Several years ago, I had the privilege to do a Zoom interview with Maestro DeMain for a blog article in my “Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown” series. It was a delightful hour, but I sensed that there was so much more we could have talked about. This book, while not exhausting the stories he could tell, gave me so much more. He portrayed his deep and ever-fresh love of all kinds of music. He captures the delight of working with composers, soloists, and musicians to bring that music to life. And in talking about his heroes, he reminds us of the village of people who formed each of us.

Review: The Know-It-All

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Cover image of "The Know-It-All" by A.J. Jacobs

The Know-It-All

The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9780743250627) 2005.

Summary: A memoir of reading the 32 volume 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover.

Many of us readers may not openly admit it, but secretly, we harbor the “know-it-all” dreams of A.J. Jacobs. We read voraciously, hoping to edge closer to knowing as much as we can about everything. Of course, this is a case of our reach exceeding our grasp. And most of us eventually settle for just being life long learners.

Perhaps Jacobs may be excused. He comes from a family of know-it-alls. His father held the record for the most footnotes in a law review article (5,435) and had also attempted to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. He got through the Bs. He also had a true know-it-all brother-in-law. Eric, who bested him in every conversation. Jacobs was pursuing a career in journalism, writing for Entertainment Weekly, and eventually Esquire. This afforded him a lot of knowledge of popular culture, but he felt all the learning of college slipping away. And so he landed on the project of reading through the 32 volumes of the 2002 Encyclopedia Britannica, from A-ak to Zywiec (a village in Poland).

Needless to say, his wife Julie, and most of the others thought it a bit crazy. And it got annoying when he injected strange facts and usually useless information into their lives, or worse, into their social gatherings. But what’s the value of being a know-it-all if you can’t show it?

The book is organized into an A to Z summary of his reading. We learn lots of interesting tidbits. For example, before vinaigrette was a salad dressing, it served as a deodorant in the eighteenth century. And A-ak? It’s a term referring to ancient East Asian music, explained more fully if you “see gagaku.” One might say, Jacobs read the Encyclopedia so we don’t have to, summarizing 33,000 pages in 400.

But there is so much more. Fancying himself a genius, he tries to join Mensa. It turns out he qualified based on his college entrance exam and a good thing, too. He miserably failed the Mensa test. But in the Mensa gatherings he generally found himself out of their league. Then there are the attempts to get onto game shows. Turns out an earlier interview with Alex Trebek disqualified him from competing. However, he manages to get onto Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Turns out he stumbles on something he read about back in the Es: erythrocytes. What component of blood are they. It turns out his brilliant brother-in-law Eric is also clueless and he ends up guessing wrong. The answer: red blood cells. So all that reading adds up to $1000 and an interesting story.

He discovers that reading the encyclopedia is a losing battle with memory. Conversations with an expert on intelligence suggest that the learning in encyclopedias is only one kind of intelligence, and perhaps not the most useful in every day life. But he is inspired by a visit to the Encyclopedia Britannica offices, where he even contributes some corrections! So what does he learn? In addition to a lot of great Scrabble words, he glimpses both the awful messes and the huge achievements of humankind. The achievements give him hope. And perhaps the article on Ecclesiastes gives him the greatest wisdom–that while life is absurd, to take pleasure in the good things God provides. And he closes the last volume, realizes he has his life back (after often reading four hours a day in addition to his day job) and enjoys a lovely dinner with his wife.

The book convinced me to settle for more modest projects. I wasn’t always sure I liked Jacobs very much, even though his romp through the encyclopedia was fun. But he is who he is with us and I guess that counts for something. So, if you’ve ever had aspirations to read through an encyclopedia (harder because only World Book still prints them), you might want to read this first. It could save you a lot of time.

Review: Becoming God’s Family

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Cover image of "Becoming God's Family" by Carmen Joy Imes

Becoming God’s Family

Becoming God’s Family, Carmen Joy Imes, IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514010327) 2025.

Summary: A biblical theology of the church for the disillusioned, addressing faults and casting vision for its importance.

This book had its beginning around a campfire with extended family. One member “expressed that he believed in Jesus but saw no use for the church.” Imes concluded, “Someone needed to make a case for it.” This book is that case. Imes recognizes that many have good reason to be disillusioned with the church. For example, she cites toxic leadership, abuse scandals, financial mismanagement, and divisive politics. But she also shows in this book how the church has, even from Old Testament times, been integral to God’s purposes. She draws arcs from the biblical stories to many contemporary abuses. But she also casts a vision for what it means for us to be the church and how we may become what we are within God’s purposes.

Beginning with Abraham, Imes traces the unfolding story of this family God forms at its best and worst. We see the harm Abraham and Sarah do in exploiting Hagar, and how, just as God saw Hagar’s suffering, he sees that of the abused. Imes describes Israel at her best, and her sad and sordid decline under the judges where they neglect even basic hospitality. Then amid the kingships of David and Solomon, Imes focuses on Rizpah. Specifically, she shows the importance of setting broken commitments right.

Following this, she addresses the divided kingdom and how false worship leads to self-destruction. Yet there are also instances of renewed attention to God’s Word. When nationhood is destroyed by exile, God sustains a community to remain and return. But the prophets recall Israel to a more expansive vision to bless the nations and become a multiethnic family. Yet the returned exiles do not fully realize that vision.

However, the coming of Jesus realizes the wider multiethnic community embedded in his human genealogy from Samaritan women to the nations of Pentecost to the Roman empire. Paul’s ministry models crossing ethnic boundaries and forming multiethnic communities that are one body. The book concludes with the vision of the church as the new temple, the place where God dwells and shows himself to the world.

Throughout this narrative, Imes offers both sparkling biblical insights and telling applications, mixed with her personal story. For example, she shows how Israel, from its beginnings was a multi-ethnic family of Egyptians, Canaanites, Mesopotamians, Midianites, and Moabites. Turning to the New Testament, she offers the idea that “all Israel” in Romans 9-11 breaks with Paul’s usage of “the Jews” in the rest of the book, and that “Israel” was dispersed among the nations in 721 BC. Rather, the restoration of “all Israel” finds fulfillment through believing Gentiles from those nations incorporated into one body with Jewish believers.

Imes also addresses contemporary concerns ranging from church abuse to Christian nationalism. She writes with conviction about the place of children in the church. Then she also discusses when it is right to leave a church. More positively, she paints a vision of an inclusive community of generosity and justice, where we experience belovedness and belonging.

While there is so much good material in this book the interleaving of biblical exegesis, contextual sidebars, applicative asides, and personal narrative sometimes results in a disjointed narrative within the chapters. Also, the final chapter theme of the new temple seemed to sparingly deal with the New Testament material. So much more could have been done, it seems with portraying the glory of God in and through his people. Instead, the concluding question is, “Where and with whom do you plan to worship this week?”

That said, there is so much that is helpful beginning with tracing the story of the church not merely to Pentecost but to Abraham. In addition to bibliography, the book includes QR codes linked to BibleProject for each chapter. Finally, Imes makes a compelling case for investing in the church, related to the purposes and working of God.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Other reviews of Carmen Joy Imes books in this series:

Bearing God’s Name: https://bobonbooks.com/2023/06/09/review-bearing-gods-name/

Being God’s Image: https://bobonbooks.com/2023/06/16/review-being-gods-image/

Review: The Gospel of Being Human

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Cover image of "The Gospel of Being Human" by Marty Solomon with Reed Dent

The Gospel of Being Human

The Gospel of Being Human, Marty Solomon with Reed Dent. NavPress (ISBN: 9781641589482) 2026.

Summary: A reframing of the gospel beginning with the good news of our humanity and an invitation to curiosity and wonder.

We often are taught that the gospel is bad news before it is good news. This book challenges this idea with the contention that before all else, our humanity is good news. God’s story in scripture begins with making us in his image. Thus we are fearfully and wonderfully made. We were created with purpose and we were deeply loved from the beginning. This book also is an invitation to be curious, to wonder, and to question how we’ve understood the story. In the end, it is a better story than many of us have been led to believe.

Marty Solomon and Harry Dent invite us over the twelve chapters of this book to explore how we think not only of our humanity but of God. Whereas we divide the world into “us” and “them,” the story of the Garden is that there is only “us,” beloved and broken rebels. We are kindred with all humanity. While it is true that of ourselves, we are incapable of pleasing God, this is not an invitation to passivity. Rather, through God’s redemptive purpose, God calls us to partner with his work in the world. But we often believe God has to punish sin before he loves us. Or he only loves us because of Jesus’ intervention. The authors observe that there is a 1000:3 ratio between God’s love and God’s wrath in scripture and God is utterly free to love us.

With this, the authors turn to our conceptions of God. God is not on the side of some people and against others. As we see in the story of Jonah, God is even for the bad guys, who are not irredeemable. God’s broken world is not beyond repair and so we are called to build lives and communities to reflect his love. And what we build will matter, and so we work with hope. But God will not win by sheer force (nor should we try) but through a “left-handed” power of humility, compassion and presence. So, our lives aren’t measured by success but faithfulness, of living connected to God.

Chapter Ten helped make clear my sense of unease with this quite engaging book. It focuses on “The Romans Road” presentation of the gospel as a formulaic solution to our sin problem. Admittedly, we can reduce the wonders of the gospel to a formula. But I felt the authors both set up a straw man that was unlike anything I’ve been taught and seemed to minimize the cross. They insist “the cross is about more than just the propitiation for our sin” but do not specify what that “more” is. It may be about more but it is not about less! And what I find the authors doing is shifting focus from the cross to “God’s love” that seems to be accessible apart from the cross.

What is hard is that the authors are spot on in focusing on God’s relentless love. But we should not shrink from the cross, uneasy with the violent death of the Son. Rather, we ought to see it as loving act of the Triune God, so identifying with humanity as to die unjustly for our sin. In so doing, God shows us our great worth and his undying love.

I raise this because there is so much good here. The focus on us as image-bearers and partners of God. That God has no “Us-Them.” The gospel as an invitation to partner in the reclamation of a very good world and about life here and now and not just after we die. I can see how the book might be helpful for those struggling with self-image or questions about faith. The first chapter on curiosity is a wonderful guide for those deconstructing (and hopefully reconstructing) faith. But I am uncomfortable about the book’s downplaying the cross. Here, too, the authors react to caricatures. Rather than re-frame with a rich theology of the cross, they shift to a God who loves and forgives freely without constraint. The implication is that Jesus didn’t need to die. I cannot commend that as gospel.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

The Weekly Wrap: August 16-22

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The Weekly Wrap: August 16-22

Amazon and AI

This week 404 Media reported tracing a shipment of old and rare books to an Amazon facility where they were scanned to train AI and then pulped. This follows a trend of booksellers receiving large orders for old and rare books for AI training purposes, a trend many are resisting.

What disturbed me is that this was another instance of Amazon aggressively advancing AI in the publishing industry. It is already the leading source of AI-generated works, allowing those creating these works to bypass conventional publishing while creating works imitative of human authors, often derived from their works.

Basically, Amazon is public enemy number one of human authors.

I have argued previously that AI-generated works ought have no place in the world of publishing. I’ll leave it to others to argue this case elsewhere. It is robbing authors of intellectual property. It tilts the playing field when works that take a week to generate compete with works taking months or years to write. Then, it also cast aspersions on all authors, especially debut writers. It displaces market share from human authors. If allowed into bookstores, it will also displace shelf space. And now, they are destroying old books.

The only way to deal with this is the marketplace. But this means supporting human authors through other vendors, since Amazon is also a huge revenue source for authors and publishers. Otherwise, Amazon will keep blithely going its way. And it is likely that the pollution of AI-generated works will spread. And I believe we will all be the poorer.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Related to my comments above, Jennifer Szalai reviews Jill Lepore’s new The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State in “A Government for the People, but Not by People.” She explores what happens when a liberal democracy is replaced by automation and machines.

Artificial intelligence offers the prospect of instant knowledge. In “Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge” Ann Lawrence-Mathers explores an ancient magical manuscript promising instant knowledge. It was not a good thing.

Authoritarian movements proclaim the weaknesses of classic liberalism. However, “The Unexpected Persistence of John Rawls” argues for the importance of Rawls’ works for articulating strengths of the liberal tradition.

Many commentators have noted that boys and young men are in trouble in our society. Joseph E. Davis, in “Nowhere Boys,” explores the underlying reasons for this crisis. This summarizes his argument:

“The boy crisis, therefore, is not a crisis of boys, but of the absence that is at the heart of our culture of autonomy. Parents and schools offer boys a language of limitlessness and push them along a trajectory of achievement in which many can find no resonance or inspiration, no stable and meaningful goals to guide and motivate their action. Being “all you can be” rings hollow when it is unclear what is important or necessary for you to actually be.”

In terms of the tilt of the earth, we have one more month of summer in the northern hemisphere. “Six Books You’ll Want to Read Outdoors” reminds us of the unique delights of outdoor reading, at least when it isn’t oppressively hot, stormy, or rainy.

Quote of the Week

Crime writer Megan Abbott was born August 21, 1971. Whether or not we are into crime fiction, many of us have at least one thing in common with her:


“I come from a family of readers. Our house smelled of book.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Abbott’s quote suggests why so many of us like bookstores, especially second hand bookstores. They smell like home.

PBS will be running a documentary on the life of poet Mary Oliver on Tuesday August 25, 9 pm ET. From responses to posting this on social media, there are a lot of Mary Oliver lovers out there. I’m among them. I also share something in common with Mary Oliver. She was born in and grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio. I lived there from 1981 to 1990. However, we never crossed paths.

I’m reading two delightful memoirs, worlds apart in many ways. One is by Muriel Elmer, describing her child as a missionary kid including the loss of her father, boarding school nightmares, and a wondrous display of fireflies one night. The other is from fellow Youngstowner John DeMain, who recently stepped down as director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra. He recounts his heroes from summer stock entrepreneur John Kenley to Leonard Bernstein, as well as the staging of a full length Porgy and Bess, which won a Grammy award in 1975. Look for reviews soon.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Marty Solomon with Reed Dent, The Gospel of Being Human

Tuesday: Carmen Joy Imes, Becoming God’s Family

Wednesday: A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

Thursday: John L. DeMain, Working With My Heroes

Friday: Jeffrey A. Lockwood, The Good Quit

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 16-22.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: Mule Boy

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Cover image of "Mule Boy" by Andrew Krivak

Mule Boy

Mule Boy, Andrew Krivak. Bellevue Literary Press. (ISBN: 9781954276468) 2026.

Summary: New Years Day 1929 changed Ondro Prach’s life. His first day as mule boy was also the day he alone survived a mine collapse.

His mother tried to avoid sending Ondro to the mines. But finally, when the mine foreman came by to offer him the beginning job of nipper, she relented. Ondro’s father had died in the mines. Ondro worked hard and soon became a spragger. Then, he was offered the job of mule boy, leading the mule that pulled cars in and out of the mine. He was assigned Wicked, who lived up to his name. But he fed him carrots and spoke softly to him in Slovak, and Wicked gave him no trouble.

His first day as mule boy was New Year’s Day. He worked with the miners John Chibala and Stefan Bozak, and their butties Emil and Matty. The whole team worked rapidly to clear the room of coal, to finish early. But just as they were loading the last bit, the mine collapsed, save for a space around a supporting beam. All but Ondro were badly injured, including Wicked who was killed in the collapsed entrance to the room.

Emil and Matty die first. Stefan and John live longer, sharing the light of carbide lamps to help Ondro dig a way out. On breaks, as their lives wane, they talk about their love of life and what it is to meet death. Ondro wonders if this dark place will be his tomb and how he will meet death. With John’s dying breath, after he has spoken of missing his daughter Magda, he points out the way for Ondro to escape, and Ondro does, but too late for the others he leaves behind.

Ondro and his mother move away but life is hard. Others mock him as “the mule boy” and he gets in fights, including one where he badly injured the other boy. So he vows never again to use violence. He works in a brewery, frequently drunk. But he begins a relationship with Magda Chibala, John’s daughter. They marry, but his drinking creates tension between them. Then the draft comes and when he reports, he refuses induction because of his vow. He spends most of the war in prison. Magda requests an annulment and marries another man.

But prison saves him. He stops drinking and meets Jacobson. Jacobson is a Jew and teaches him enough Hebrew to read the book of Jonah, which he will read each sabbath for the rest of his life. And he teaches him the philosophy of Parmenides. And then he is released to serve out the war at a fire lookout and forest ranger in New England, settling there alone and staying on until he retires. Then the visits begin from the families of the miners, wanting to know of their loved ones’ last moments and final words. And through these visits, the full story of the cave-in and escape emerges. Finally, Magda comes. And he shares things about her father never spoken in their brief marriage. But what of them?

Jonah seems particularly significant to understanding this story. Ondro spends days in the belly of the earth; Jonah in the belly of the fish. Both were dark places, death places. The great fish vomits up Jonah. Ondro crawls through the rotting carcass of Wicked. They both live, but never the same. And they both carry “words” for others.

The story is one continuous sentence, reflecting the unfolding memories of Ondro looking back. I have to admit finding it hard to find stopping places, but the continuous narrative makes sense of the flow of his life, interwoven with memories of the fateful events of the mine. It’s a compelling story of meeting death and making meaning of life, often with much faltering along the way and with the help of others. I found it an exquisite story, one in which every word does its work, with nothing extraneous.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.